A Brief History of Neoliberalism

In the US, the Walton family has become immensely rich as Wal-Mart has surged into a dominant position in US retailing but with integration into Chinese production lines as well as retail stores worldwide. While there are obvious links between these sorts of activities and the world of finance, the incredible ability not only to amass large persona

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The idea of freedom ‘thus degenerates into a mere advocacy of free enterprise’, which means ‘the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure and security need no enhancing, and a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property’.

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Common sense can, therefore, be profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural prejudices.1 Cultural and traditional values (such as belief in God and country or views on the position of women in society) and fears (of communists, immigrants, strangers, or ‘others’) can be mobilized to mask other realities. Political

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This history of neoliberalization and class formation, and the proliferating acceptance of the ideas of the Mont Pelerin Society as the ruling ideas of the time, makes for interesting reading when placed against the background of counter-arguments laid out by Karl Polanyi in 1944 (shortly before the Mont Pelerin Society was established). In a compl

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The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking, and it has long dominated the US stance towards the rest of the world.7 What the US evidently sought to impose by main force on Iraq was a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions f

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In so far as neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs’, it emphasizes the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace.2 It holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of m

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Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and

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For any way of thought to become dominant, a conceptual apparatus has to be advanced that appeals to our intuitions and instincts, to our values and our desires, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the social world we inhabit. If successful, this conceptual apparatus becomes so embedded in common sense as to be taken for granted and not ope

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We can, therefore, interpret neoliberalization either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites. In what follows I shall argue that the second of these objectives

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All forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favour of individualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values. The ideological assault along these lines that flowed from Thatcher’s rhetoric was relentless.17 ‘Economics are the method’, she said, ‘but the object is to change the soul.’ And change it she did, though in

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